Tuesday 31 December 2013

Advertising Standards Authority condone bank's lies.

The idea that banks simply "lend" money in the normal sense of the word is actually false. I wrote about this before here. You may have noticed however, that banks are happy to use the word "loan" in their advertising. So I decided to write to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to see what they had to say on the matter. According to their website, the ASA's mission is to "ensure that advertising in all media is legal, decent, honest and truthful". Let's see...

In their reply, they said...

"we acknowledge that the wording could be seen as being technically inaccurate"

...interesting. Note that "technically inaccurate" is a euphemism for lie. Reminds me of terminological inexactitude!

They went on to say...

"we consider that the ads are unlikely to mislead consumers into making a transactional decision with regard to the advertisers’ services that they would not have otherwise made"

I would dispute their claim, certainly in the long run. If more people, including economists, were aware of the true workings of our crazy monetary system, the entire course of our economic history would probably have been quite different and so many of the loans that were taking place in the run up to the credit crunch would never have taken place. Allowing banks to lie in their advertising is just one more contribution to the world's misunderstanding of money. Apart from anything, what are the ASA doing, allowing any lies in adverts at all? Sure, there are many adverts that have comedy lies, or unreal events that everyone knows are unreal. But lies where the viewer will probably believe the lie to be true? Surely that can't be allowed.

I strongly suspect the ASA is a sham organisation who's main purpose is to protect advertisers from genuine regulation, just like self-regulation by the British press. The ASA are gutless and toothless.

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